Tag Archives: english

On 19 May the TAKE FIVE club passed another milestone on the freeway of its five-year history. We had the immense pleasure and honor of welcoming 10 first-year secondary school students to an extraordinary one-off session. In collaboration with their English teacher we paddled into uncharted waters to discover and embrace a long-dormant possibility of our club.

“Hi there, Take Five organizers! I’m Svoboda Róbert, English teacher from Budapest. Balázs knows me…” That’s how it all began. We agreed that a regular session would be deep water for the students with all the strangers (not to mention the psychological trauma Balázs is likely to cause with his mere appearance), so we put our heads together and decided to organize a one-time special event, elegantly squeezed in between two scheduled meetings. Our goal was to keep the original, academically acclaimed and at the same time world famous TAKE FIVE format, but adjust everything to the proficiency level and age group.

One speaker from each group summarized their discussion in a few sentences. On the tables you can see our newly-acquired mushrooms that the groups can turn on once they finish.

Robi was brave enough to join one of the preceding events to sit down with us and help us lay down the foundations. In harmonious cooperation we imposed our brilliant ideas on him, which he tacitly and respectfully accepted. Our final plans included an ice-breaker, three of the topics we had already used at the club, and two amusing picture-based creative writing tasks. The session lasted for two hours with a ten-minute break.

Despite the fact that I am quite used to being surrounded by ladies, I was preparing for the event with a more or less healthy gender ratio in my mind. If you take a brief look at any of the photos, you may see how close I got. I think I will never be able to write down in a public blog how terrified I felt when I saw ten teenage girls walk into the club in a straight line. They all settled down and we dived right into the introduction part. One of our most favorite ice-breakers is a game called alphabet, in which we scatter the letters of the alphabet all over the floor. Then we ask questions and everyone has to find the starting letter of their answers. The girls became pretty excited upon hearing the questions “What’s your favorite band/singer?” and “What’s your favorite TV show?”. I turned out to be the only one who was having trouble coming up with answers and finding the letters.

Robi was giving us a helping hand.

Our lovely guests began to feel more and more comfortable as time passed. I would probably have burst out crying and/or run away if I had been taken to a club like this in the first year of secondary school. But to my astonishment, these girls made themselves feel at home by the end. They were ready to volunteer when it came to summarizing the topics, the room was often filled with laughter, and – as far as I could see – they did enjoy most of what we had prepared with. The session was concluded with a round of applause and a volley of thank-yous.

As the founder of the TAKE FIVE club and as an English teacher, I can confirm that this exceptional occasion was nothing but the first step. From now on we are looking forward to working together with other schools as well to provide more and more students with a genuine English-speaking setting where they have a chance to put theory into practice.

March 17 was undoubtedly a noteworthy day this year. We organized the fourth TAKE FIVE session of the spring season. Oh, and Saint Patrick’s Day happens to have fallen on the very same Thursday. For this negligible reason we decided to go off the weather-beaten track and invite our visitors to celebrate this special day with us. We also had the honor to welcome an extraordinary guest.

We took off with the following introductory question: what would you be a patron saint of? Then, instead of reaching for the color envelopes, we continued with a nice Saint Patrick’s Day quiz compiled by Era. It contained twelve questions carefully arranged in order of difficulty. We had the wonderful plan of showing the questions on the big screen using a PPT. As the saying goes: man proposes, CD-FŰ disposes. The TV had been moved to the other room for the darts players. Mastering your ability to improvise is among the perks of being a club organizer. We ended up reading out the questions one by one. In each round the members of the three small groups had to put their heads together and find the answer in one-two minutes.

The two organizers on the left are immersed in a riveting debate on how many beers they were going to order in the break. They even wrote it down just to be on the safe side.

We concluded this exciting show with two extra questions, one of which was “How many million pints of Guinness are consumed world-wide on St. Patrick’s Day?” (The astounding answer is 13 million pints.) The extra questions served as a smooth and almost unnoticeable transition to the topic of the day. The credit for the description goes to Balázs.

IT’S SAINT PADDY’S, HAVE A PINT!
Saint Patrick’s Day is celebrated all around the world. Not only is it celebrated, people celebrate it in fashion – mostly dressing up in green and getting severely drunk. This happens more than enough at other occasions as well, but on Saint Patrick’s Day it is definitely encouraged. Do you think that it is wrong to encourage drinking on a society level because it maximises peer pressure, or it doesn’t matter because anyone can say no whenever they want to? Do you think that peer pressure is harmful in general? Have you ever done something out of peer pressure – because everyone else was doing it?

The questions of social drinking and peer pressure planted the seeds for an insightful discussion, which was later crowned by the four speakers on the podium. After they had presented their thoughts on the matter, the conversation shifted from the original topic to social media – whether creating a Facebook account could also be the result of peer pressure today.

Before the break, Era and I read out the trivia questions again with the correct answers, and announced the winner group. As a prize each member of the group could choose one thing from the menu for free.

However hard we tried, we didn’t manage to withhold our creative power when it came to the game. We had previously made a list of all the patron saints the people had said as their answer to the introductory question. We started off by giving one patron saint from the list to each group. They were then asked to come up with a name and a brief history for their saints. Finally, one person from each group took the hot seat and read out their stories. The game turned out to be so successful that it became more and more difficult to breathe from the laughter as the speakers took turns. It was indeed the perfect way to end our Saint Patrick’s Day event.

English Club Crossover

As Mac Taylor and Horatio Caine from the two CSI series met occasionally in crossover episodes, a kind gentleman from another English club was among our guests that night. Balázs and I spent an hour talking with Gergő before saying goodnight. He told us that they had founded their club just recently, and we were invited to check it out in the near future. Their club is called Chatterbox Chat Club. (Click here to see their Facebook group.) We were delighted to receive lots of compliments from Gergő on our work.

As you know, you can always find our latest event on Facebook. Keep in mind that we are open to your topic recommendations. Feel free to contact us and tell us about your ideas.

With summer coming up and the TAKE FIVE season ending, it was clearly fate’s intervention that we ran into two of the organizers as they had just finished a class. Luckily, they had some time on their hands before the next one, so we decided to ask them a few questions about the past, present, and future of the club.

INTERVIEWER: So, how did the spring season of 2015 go? Was it any different from the previous seasons?

ZSOMBOR: It was much more than we’d expected. You know, we have a genuine formula that we use every time we gather. There is a more or less thought-provoking or amusing “warm-up question” which is there to get the ball rolling, like If you had a chance to go on a beach holiday with a famous person, who would it be and why? Afterwards, we fan out the tiny envelopes which contain all the topics with short descriptions and debate questions. For this season we introduced a “summary” part, which means that after the small groups have finished discussing the topics (two or three, depending on their popularity), one speaker is elected in each group. They sit down next to each other, give a brief summary of their discussion to the “audience”, and that usually gives rise to short debates. It depends on the topics, of course. The “What is art?” topic led us to tricky grounds…

INTERVIEWER: There is a game near the end of every meeting, is that right?

ZSOMBOR: Oh, yeah, the game. I have a feeling that everyone is looking forward to that from the moment they walk in. There is a selection of games we alternate throughout the season. If I remember correctly, the games we played in the spring were Alibi, Taboo, Last Letter, and a game we simply call “Nóra’s game” as she was the one who recommended it years ago. It always seems to work because it relies on the guests’ creativity. They all have to come up with a few words which, then, all go into a hat. And… I’m not gonna tell you more. Join us next time and see for yourself! (laughs) Oh, and I played two rounds of chess with Antal, but that’s another story. I hope I’ll have a chance in the summer to make up for that last time.

INTERVIEWER: The readers may also be interested in how the TAKE FIVE club has come to be what it is today.

ZSOMBOR: That’s quite an uninteresting story. I was walking around on Margaret Island in the summer of 2011, and I came across a sign on a post that read “conversation club”. They offered four languages. I became interested right away. For some reason, however, I couldn’t attend the weekly sessions, but as I kept thinking about it, something struck me. I posed myself the question: If you are studying to be a teacher and you already give lessons, why don’t you found your own club? I chewed on it for a while and then decided to give it a shot. Nothing to lose, I thought.

INTERVIEWER: Watching these old photos, the club looked very different. Is it just the photos?

ZSOMBOR: No, it was indeed very different. First, we started out in an empty room of an art gallery in the 5th district. The topics weren’t well organized, to say the least. Sometimes we just picked a slip of paper with “old music vs. modern music” on it, and tried to discuss it. It didn’t really work out. The topics seemed like those sloppy oral tasks from your language exam book. Although the special TAKE FIVE atmosphere came to life in the very first year, it wasn’t quite enough. I decided to raise the stakes, so to speak. I assembled a group of three organizers, including myself, and we began to work hard. We beefed up our Facebook page, created an independent website, and spent a great deal of time collecting topics. This was in 2013, I guess.

INTERVIEWER: Balázs, where do you come into the picture? Were you part of that first organizer group?

BALÁZS: No, I wasn’t part of the organizers at first. I believe I started attending the club in … now let’s see, I’m always in trouble when I’m asked this because I honestly don’t remember (laughs). I think I first attended in the spring season of 2013. I was good friends with Fanni by then, and she suggested I check out the club. Needless to say, it was love at first sight, and I don’t recall that I missed many occasions. I was a regular club member at first, and then in (turns to Zsombor), yeah in the beginning of 2014 I became an organizer. Zsombor hasn’t turned me out yet (laughs), so I suppose I’ll stay on board.

INTERVIEWER: Although all of you were insistent on going on holiday, rumor has it that you have planted the seeds for a summer season. Would you mind telling us a few words about that?

BALÁZS: Yeah, we’re glad you asked. We are proud to say that the rumors are true, and special TAKE FIVE summer sessions will, most likely, be held. It seems that enough people are interested, which is always lovely to see. There will be a few changes, though. First of all, these sessions will be primarily run by me, as I can’t expect the others to take on this responsibility in the summer.

INTERVIEWER: And what about the structure of the club meetings?

BALÁZS: No major changes there. The warm-up question stays, followed by discussion in small groups, and then the game. The only thing that’s different is that we’re going to give the guests a bit more freedom in the choice of topics. They may bring articles that they find interesting, or just an idea, as long as they prepare a few thought-provoking questions as well. Or, occasionally, there won’t be any topics, but they will have to come up with something together, like a sales pitch for whacky summertime inventions. We actually tried this game once this season, and it’s a lot of fun.

INTERVIEWER: It sounds like a hilarious game! Also, it must require quite a high level of language proficiency. What is the minimum level that you recommend for the visitors?

BALÁZS: We have guests ranging from A2 level [elementary language level] to C2, and I’ve never seen anyone snicker at another’s mistake or incorrect word use. Instead, they listen and nod encouragingly, which is fantastic to see. The most important thing for us is that the general TAKE FIVE spirit is maintained; a fun, inclusive group of people, where you only need to speak as much as you want to, and you don’t have to be afraid of people ridiculing you for your language skills.

INTERVIEWER: And what about the venue? I understand that lately you have been in a teahouse/pub, which is underground.

BALÁZS: Yeah, it’s a great place, but since it’s going to be summer, we will look for something outdoors. We haven’t actually decided on a place, but it will be all in the first event, we will keep everyone informed. So don’t forget to check our Facebook page!

February 1, 2015: We spent a long day with a group of enthusiastic English learners (A2 and B2 levels). The daily menu contained amusing introductory games, a bit of grammar practice, translation, whodunnit, and gap-filling listening exercises. For dessert, we offered short “Awkward Situation” scenes written and performed by the teachers themselves. This was only the first intensitve English course for 2015. Stay tuned until the next two-day summer course!

“The English language is like London: proudly barbaric yet deeply civilised, too, common yet royal, vulgar yet processional, sacred yet profane. Each sentence we produce, whether we know it or not, is a mongrel mouthful of Chaucerian, Shakespearean, Miltonic, Johnsonian, Dickensian and American. Military, naval, legal, corporate, criminal, jazz, rap and ghetto discourses are mingled at every turn. The French language, like Paris, has attempted, through its Academy, to retain its purity, to fight the advancing tides of Franglais and international prefabrication. English, by comparison, is a shameless whore.”

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TAKE FIVE is a conversation club that gives you the opportunity to refresh, practice and improve your English every second week in the heart of Budapest. Spend three hours in the best possible atmosphere, where language development and entertainment are in perfect balance. Don't hesitate to join us!